We want to put on our headphones, dive into Omnigraffle, and crank out wireframes. We design in a corner, without involving anyone else. But that’s not really design — it’s self indulgence for imposing your perspective on a product.

Well crafted interaction design comes out of understanding the environment through the eyes of our users: their wants, their needs, their pain points. It goes beyond the “what” so we can understand the “why.” Our craft requires us to study people and their motivations at a level that most will never understand. That requires us to learn, whether we are on the clock or not.

Here’s how you can become a better designer in less than an hour a day. You don’t have to do this everyday, but the more you do it, the more you’ll learn.

You’re running a startup. You ask the developers who the next hire should be.

“We need a unicorn.”

“What’s that?”

“You know, someone who can code, design graphics, design user experience, write copy, and do all the HTML and CSS for us. They’re cheap and easy to find. They should be able to take out the trash. Oh, and wash our cars wearing a bikini.”

And unicorns can fly.

The unicorn designer is the most in demand and rarest of product team members — someone with excellent interaction design skills, visual design skills, and coding ability. Unobtanium.

Unicorn designers exist, but they’re expensive, overworked, and generally can’t cover all the bases as well as advertised.

Unicorn designers exist, but they’re expensive, overworked, and generally can’t cover all the bases as well as advertised. The better ones have over 10 years of experience and the consulting rate to show it. If you get a good one, you’re going to be paying a lot.

Your job is to properly select resources and avoid needing a unicorn. If you have to hire someone to cover that many skill sets, you have failed at building the right team. Working with a great interaction designer is the most important decision you can make for the success of your startup. Design-led organizations succeed.

If you’re looking for a unicorn, many designers will pass because the request will show a lack of knowledge about building a team.

Here’s a few suggestions to avoid the “we need a unicorn” conversation.

I would hire an interaction designer that can build almost production-ready prototypes in HTML and CSS. They can build something that gets you to version one, and integrate outsourced elements if need be. They should also train the developers how to do front end development so they won’t have to later.

The other valuable and common combination is interaction plus visual design, because they can be utilized for producing marketing materials. If this is the skillset hired, the developers have to pick up the HTML and CSS.

Implement the “need three, pick two” rule for the rest of your team

Avoid stay-at-home defensemen: people that can perform only one role.

The reason most developers avoid doing front-end development is because it is time consuming and tedious. Developers are a precious commodity, but coddled developers lead to failed startups. If you’re working on a smaller team, its up to everyone to pull their weight. It’s part of the job.

Avoid stay-at-home defensemen: people that can perform only one role. If they are straight javascript developers, for example, they would be the first candidate for that second skill since they are already working on the front end.

If you have a team of at least two developers, one of them should be able to develop in HTML, CSS and jQuery. If they are missing those skills, or think it’s “someone else’s job,” seriously consider which one is worth replacing and find another one that fits your needs.

Also, consider other team members and their contribution: If you have hired a product manager than only wants to develop features, but doesn’t wireframe, write copy, do marketing or have other skills, they might be a liability. The same goes for the visual designer that is someone’s cousin: If all they know is Photoshop and can’t do HTML, they shouldn’t be a full time resource.

The most common reason why unicorns are needed is because initial team staffing wasn’t done right. It’s up to you to correct it.

Outsource certain tasks

The best thing about the web is that there are a tremendous number of resources to help you find part-time people.

The best thing about the web is that there are a tremendous number of resources to help you find part-time people. Will it be restaurant quality? No, but it will get you to an MVP.

Places where it is ideal to outsource (and where you can do it cheap!) are logo and visual design. Come up with rough layouts, and at the very least you can put it on 99 Designs for a few hundred dollars. The drag on that is there will be more overhead on your part to review submissions.

Front end developers can also be found through online resources like freelancer.com. They’ll take a photoshop file, slice and dice it, and give the final code to your main development team. There will still be integration time, but this may be a solution to this problem.

You can also bring in consultants to review your interaction design if you are doing it yourself. They’ll cost more via a day rate than you would pay them hourly, but in the long run the advice they give you may make or break your product.

Use templates and frameworks

Every startup that I’ve seen spend a lot of money on visual design early on ended up wasting most of it.

Your first design is not going to be the design you go with long term. You’re going to pivot, change designs, rejigger ideas. Every startup that I’ve seen spend a lot of money on visual design early on ended up wasting most of it.

The solution is to use Template Monster and other sites that have a ton of Photoshop and HTML templates that are pre-built, ready to go, and cheap — sometimes under $50. They are good enough so that your site appears professional when you go out to do usability testing with your interaction designer.

Included in the mix is Twitter Bootstrap, Foundation and other frameworks. While the initial iterations might look like hundreds of other sites, the frameworks are easy enough for most back end developers to use and will get you to something functional.

There are also a ton of templates for them, so you can skin another look and feel. I have an extensive list of resources that should get you to launch.

Keep it basic

Repeat after me — it’s not about the shiny, it’s not about the shiny, it’s not about the shiny.

It’s about shipping so you can test and pivot.

As much as you want your first version to be perfect, you’ll change your idea several times until you find market fit. The most important thing is to have the right guidance to help you find market fit, and that is most likely to happen with a great interaction designer.

You don’t need a Masters degree from Carnegie Mellon to practice user experience.

Every day thousands of people practice user experience in their jobs, and they do so without knowing it. And they might be doing it poorly, if they don’t understand the methods and practices that are used by designers to produce great products.

Researching the market, iteration, or other methods are unknown to them, and there aren’t a lot of publications that service this market of unknowing UX designers.

Aimed at the same market and a great companion to Eric Reis’ Lean Startup, the publication is a very concise overview of what user experience is and how you can apply it in just about any startup environment.

It purposely omits case studies because Laura feels that every situation is unique. Everyone should figure out a process that works for them, iterating until it works. Lean Process for doing Lean UX.

It doesn’t use big words

The book is an excellent guide for mid-career UX designers that want to move to a more iterative process and away from waterfall, and for founders that don’t have the money to pay for a user experience designer and would need to have a go at it themselves.

One of the biggest frustrations for non-designers regarding user experience books is that many of them use overly technical terms to describe some of the process that are used in the field. For example, I have a hard enough time pronouncing “ethnographic research”, much less spelling it.

Laura calls it what it is: “You know, listening to your users.”

She does this consistently throughout the book, explaining terms in a voice that is similar to what I love about her blog — taking complex concepts and explaining them in a way that doesn’t belittle the reader, unlike many other publications in our field.

Testing ideas quicker and cheaper

Engineers are expensive. Designers are expensive. How do you mitigate that cost?

Designing small prototypes and doing quick sketches with pen and paper that test your assumptions is the way to go, and Laura discusses tools that allow founders to do that. She specifically calls out frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap, which is revolutionizing prototyping, and wireframe tools like Balsamiq (which, ironically is what the wireframes in the book are done in).

There’s also solid commentary about the value of interactive prototypes — they take a long time to build — and discussion of when you should use a medium fidelity prototype (testing more complex concepts) versus something simple, like a visual change or a landing page for A/B Testing.

Quick, dirty, and cheap usability methodologies

She advocates methods that are much quicker, and more cost effective so that you can use many more of them.

If you’re working for Facebook, Google, or other large organizations, you have a lot of resources at your disposal — usability testing labs, eye tracking machines, and big budgets to spend on bringing in people that fit your target audience.

That’s. Not. Lean.

The book explains that this sort of testing, especially early on in the product development process, is a waste of time and money. She advocates methods that are much quicker (the book has a whole section on the value of guerilla user tests), and more cost effective so that you can use many more of them.

One of the methods she discusses that I have used personally is the Starbucks usability test: sit down in a local coffee shop, set up your laptop, and offer someone a free coffee to spend 10 minutes using your product. You would be surprised how many people are willing to do it, and I’ve done it several times, most recently for a startup project. We did the test at The Creamery in San Francisco, and we got a demographic that was a lot less techie than you would think.

Measuring every step of the process

The book covers a data-driven design process which explains the value of A/B testing, why it works, and how to use it properly.

Having been through the startup process one too many times, I’ve watched founders spend thousands of dollars on building a product without measuring their progress by gathering user data. They get to the end of development, release the product into the wild, and wonder how to pivot because of low user adoption.

(I think this is where I’m usually screaming at the client, “Your idea is never going to work” before launch, because nothing was tested in front of any live users other than the founder’s wife.)

The book covers a data-driven design process which explains the value of A/B testing, why it works, and how to use it properly. It also explains some of the misconceptions about A/B testing that are often brought up by user experience professionals, and how to overcome the fear of testing everything.

A discussion of when not to design

“Your goal for this type of design is to make things easy, obvious, and useful.”

Most founders get hung up on the shiny when they really should be focusing on user adoption, and this is well covered in the book.

If you’re doing a startup, those initial designs will usually end up in the electronic trash as you pivot and iterate your way to success. Especially in startups.

Laura makes this point exactly: “Your goal for this type of design is to make things easy, obvious, and useful.”

I personally care less about initial designs than the developers and product owners I work with, because I know it’s a starting point. I’ve heard time and again, the designer is the person that cares least about the color of a button.

Laura makes that point too: “I’ve seen too many companies spending time quibbling over the visual design of incredibly important features, which just ends up delaying the release of these features.”

And any delay for this reason will delay getting feedback from real users.

The Conclusion

The book is an invaluable resource for demystifying the Lean Process. It’s also an excellent guide for mid-career UX designers that want to move to a more iterative process and away from waterfall, and for founders that don’t have the money to pay for a user experience designer and would need to have a go at it themselves.

Designers like myself that have been using some of this approach for a long while before it was called “lean” will find this book a good validation of their methods.

Also, if you’re doing your own startup and don’t have formal user experience training, or you are a designer and don’t know how to build your own product, you should buy this book.

I received a suggestion from a friend of mine, “Why don’t you get a list of the best portfolios you have seen, and post them?”

What a great idea!

I don’t go out looking for them — I do have a day job — but I will be doing an article about portfolios.

I need a bunch submitted, plus I’ll send a $100 Starbucks Card to what I think is the best portfolio. The final deadline is August 15, 2013.

There are no rules for this other than what I pick, so no whining is allowed. And you can’t win if you aren’t following me on Twitter.

If it’s a portfolio that sets no context (read: Dribble), I probably won’t feature it. It has to tell a story about each client you worked with, and the overall story of your career. I’ll keep track of the best designers and send them off to some super cool companies. Remember, you have to be a UX Designer. Visual design is a plus, but it won’t be the focus of this post.

Many UX Designers are prototyping their designs using frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap, and building these prototypes has never been faster. The frameworks support responsive design, so you can develop for different breakpoints without breaking your head on the table.

Ideally, these frameworks should speed up front-end development if teams figure out out the right workflow. I’ve found these tools to be invaluable to speed development, and illustrate concepts to developers.

Here’s the list I have compiled, with descriptions from Wikipedia. It’s my list, so don’t be offended if you aren’t on it.

Twitter Bootstrap

A free collection of tools for creating websites and web applications. It contains HTML and CSS-based design templates font typography, forms, buttons, charts, navigation and other interface components, as well as optional JavaScript extensions. It is the most popular project in GitHub and is used by NASA and MSNBC among others.

NVD3A list of functions that creates some of the most common data visualizations.

RickshawA list of functions that creates some time-based data visualizations.

Angular JS

An open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment browser-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

There’s a shortage of good user experience designers. It’s not going to go away anytime soon, but it’s something we can fix.

Organizations relocate people because “we couldn’t find a good fit” or “there was a skills gap” when at the same time designers are leaving because “there aren’t enough opportunities.”

Resourcing challenges make sense in places like Cleveland or North Carolina where local UX talent is in its early stages of development. Cities like Los Angeles and Vancouver, however, are losing a lot of local talent because there aren’t enough opportunities for designers to develop their careers.

UX leaders need to build the farm system in their respective cities and cultivate opportunities for designers to stay.

I’ve met more designers from Vancouver in Seattle and San Francisco than in Vancouver itself. Their common refrain: “There weren’t enough opportunities.”

UX leaders need to build the farm system in their respective cities and cultivate opportunities for designers to stay.

Cultivate local leadership

Look at who’s running your local events and ask the following questions:

Are they a great cheerleader for user experience, but aren’t highly skilled?

Are they running the group only to benefit their career and no one else’s?

Would you put them in front of C-Level executives to talk about the ROI of effective design?

Can they put together a five-year plan for growing membership and work with local businesses to create more opportunities?

If the answers to any of these is “no”, there’s a need for leadership change.

“What we aim to do with NELAUX is bring the community together to focus the attention on the wealth of talented resources that are available in Northeast LA and are currently, miserably commuting across town in order to bring more tech-driven innovation to the area,” Fox says. “So far, the response has been extraordinary.”

Work with incubators

The best example I’ve seen lately is Paul Sherman’s efforts in Youngstown, Ohio. Paul, a past president of the Usability Professionals Association, is working with a business incubator. He advises startups on the block and tackling of User Experience.

His reason? He wanted better Chinese restaurants.

“We moved here three years ago because my older in-laws needed care and assistance from our generation. We’re just at that age, I guess. While Northeastern Ohio has some tech companies, there is definitely not the amount and depth of UX talent here that you’d see in Research Triangle, Austin, or even Cleveland,” said Sherman.

“It’s been interesting to bring the gospel of UX to entrepreneurs in this area, this time with a dozen more years of experience. Sometimes it’s frustrating running over the same ground I covered ten years ago with a new crowd.”

“It helps to have these entrepreneurs better understand what good UX looks and feels like from using their phones and tablets. We didn’t have that ten years ago.”

“It helps to have these entrepreneurs better understand what good UX looks and feels like from using their phones and tablets. We didn’t have that ten years ago.”
Paul Sherman

He figured if he could help encourage more startups to move into Youngstown, the number of restaurant choices would increase. Youngstown’s low cost of living and ideal location (Carnegie Mellon and Youngstown State University are among many colleges within easy driving distance) make the town a great place to develop talent effectively and cost-efficiently. That means User Experience opportunities.

We need to work with incubators that fund sustainable ideas.

Social gaming isn’t sustainable. Simple e-commerce sites aren’t sustainable. Enterprise applications and consumer products that solve real problems are, and those are the opportunities we should pursue.

Fight for more User Experience full-time positions

There’s nothing that hurts User Experience designers more than the six month contract.

Can effective products be developed at organizations where the financial commitment for developers and designers is different?

The contracts expire, corporate rules take hold, and designers can’t apply for full-time positions — not only in that group, but the whole company. If you have to take that contract short-term to pay rent, it hurts your long-term career prospects and your portfolio.

There are legions of designers with portfolios full of wireframes and nothing else. I’ve seen designers with ten years of experience and yet their portfolios shows less process than graduates straight out of school. In certain cities, like Los Angeles, it’s chronic. Agencies retrofit wireframes into concepts. It’s not unusual to see a firm advertise for a two-day engagement to show that they performed research.

As an industry, this is unsustainable.

Many organizations have legions of developers they hire on a full-time basis, yet don’t accord the same benefits to designers. This raises the question: can effective products be developed at organizations where the financial commitment for developers and designers is different?

We need to give designers a chance at the full design and development lifecycle. We should push for more full-time positions because it increases opportunities for designers to learn and grow.

Build better events

The biggest complaint I hear about local events? Too high level with content that isn’t actionable.

More presentations on Lean UX, Guerilla Research, and prototyping represent skills that many employers want, and what many designers want to hear about.

Designers would benefit from events that handle the nuts and bolts of doing user experience. More presentations on Lean UX, Guerilla Research, and prototyping represent skills that many employers want, and what many designers want to hear about.

Seattle’s UX Meetup Group events cover all ranges of the spectrum. Designers in the Pacific Northwest are very serious about doing great design, and it shows. Events like the portfolio review are much more valuable for most designers than going into the intricacies of elaborate taxonomies, a challenge they may see only a few times in their career.

The conclusion — we have to do more

It’s not enough to just hold events.

We have to be better leaders, better mentors, and reach out to local businesses to prove our value.

Bigger than Instagram! Bigger than Twitter! Bigger than Facebook! Bigger than Google!

Okay, maybe not. Still, it’s going to be huge. You’ve raised a little money (if you’re lucky), and you want to build a MVP, known as a minimum viable product. That’s the bare minimum you need to get a product out the door and so you can test your concept against customers.

Sounds easy, right?

Even for a MVP, it takes a village to build a product.

The village has several roles, and selecting the right team early can make or break your idea. Your village will never be of an ideal size, but understanding what you need from your townsfolk can help you make some hard decisions on how to staff the team. Early on, flexibility is the key. You may also have to split up the work if it’s a side project and everyone has a day job.

Even for a MVP, it takes a village to build a product. The village has several roles, and selecting the right team early can make or break your idea.

The composition of the ideal team has been a question that’s been on Quora, and great advice can be traced to a simple model that Dave McClure of 500 Startups advocates — Hustler, Hacker, and Designer — but it has to be viewed within the context of what you’re building. This article covers all the roles that go into building a product, and places where you can “cheat”, i.e. fill in with people that are in other roles. Minimum viable product projects are about building something to a level that gets you started, within extreme constraints.

When building the MVP, everyone’s favorite word should be “No.” As in, “No, we aren’t going to build a big product. We’re going to build something simple so that we can test our idea and see if it’s viable.”

And remember, it’s just not about the MVP, but planning for something bigger: use team members that can play multiple roles now, so you can grow and expand later. If your friends can’t perform the vital tasks of Sales, Marketing and/or Business Development, they might not be a good fit. The team will also vary depending on your idea — the roles needed for a tech-heavy idea differ significantly from something like Groupon or Uber, which are more sales driven.

Following are the typical roles of any software development team.

Each is essential to the success of a product. Each is priced pretty close to the others, depending on experience level. And each needs to be filled by someone who can perform that task. For example, if you don’t have someone in the role of UX Designer or Product Manager you’re still doing the tasks associated with that role — you’re just doing them poorly.

Product Management

A Product Manager is exactly how it reads: they manage the development and the feature set of the product.

It’s the ultimate jack of all trades position: they play several roles, but never have time to do any of them at an expert level.

They should be competent at a lot of things, like writing copy and distilling customer feedback. They own tasks that are pure strategy, like pricing, product roadmap, and product marketing. There are also tasks that are tactical, like day-to-day program management, and making sure everyone is marching in the same direction. That means having a lot of diplomatic skills, because everyone feels like they own the product with an MVP.

Great product managers have to understand technology, the business and the user — at the same time. If they don’t, they will be thrown to the wolves quickly, unmercilessly, and rightfully so. A product manager that doesn’t gain the trust and respect of the team is in trouble from day one. The ultimate test: being able to speak to the business, to the user, and to the technical solution at the same time, and lead without having direct reports. That’s hard.

Product managers should know how to prioritize their time and to delegate appropriately. If they’re working 60 hours a week, they probably aren’t very good at their job.

Product managers should know how to prioritize their time and to delegate appropriately. If they’re working 60 hours a week, they probably aren’t very good at their job.

What job titles should I look for? Product Manager, Program Manager, Project Manager. Some project managers have skillsets that are too narrow for Product Management.

Should I outsource it? Absolutely not — this is the idea role. If your idea is about user acquisition early on, you can skip some of the business modeling or hire someone else to do it. However, understanding your market is essential to the success of your MVP, because it’s going to change, a lot.

Who else can perform the role? A good Interaction Designer can cover 60 to 70 percent of any product manager’s role, so someone with that background can do it. One of the founders, possibly the idea guy, should be this person because they’ll care the most. The hustler can also bring ideas from the customers — the key is mining those ideas for great product features.

When should I hire this as a full time position? It depends. Early on, they should be playing other roles, like business development. In some organizations, a designer or engineer might also be acting as a product manager. They act as project management, and with the interaction designer, should be the hub of activity. The best staffing model is one product manager for every three to six developers.

What keywords should I look for in resumes? Most product managers should have a portfolio of products they can point to at being successful at. Look for the following keywords: Research, product marketing, product roadmap, copywriting, pricing models.

What’s a great interview question to ask? “If Dave McClure gives you a million dollars to build a product and a team, what does your product development process look like?”

Interaction Design

Interaction Designers are the people who design a product that will encourage adoption, engagement, and hopefully profitability. They are essentially the product architects — someone that describes the structure of what you are doing so everyone else can fill in the blanks.

Great User Experience designers are OCD about developing products, because the user is who matters most.

Great User Experience designers are OCD about developing products, because the user is who matters most. No engagement and no adoption means no startup, right?

They are trained to build usable products within established constraints, and usually are more familiar with the development process than most product managers. A good interaction designer will save you time and money because they’ll test features quickly with prototypes and say yea or nay. Getting actionable data early and often is invaluable for MVPs.

Should I outsource it? Risky, but it can be done under the right circumstances. This tends to be the hardest role to fill because good Interaction Designers are hard to find, and they like getting paid. This can also be the most essential role in a design-led organization, so depending on your needs you might be better off hiring a designer that can manage product than vice versa.

Who else can perform this role? You can hire a Visual Designer to do interaction design — many visual designers also claim interaction design as a skillset — but there might be an early emphasis on pretty over functional in the product, and this can mean death. The floors of the startup world are littered with the very pretty corpses of non-functional ideas. Or you can learn to do this yourself (This Triptrotting story is an example of founders that learned how to wireframe), but it’s really, really risky. Would you trust your open heart surgery to your cousin?

When should I hire this as a full time position? It depends. A great part time interaction design consultant can dramatically improve the product, but this also means they have no skin in the game. If they are acting as the product manager (many go this route), one interaction designer for every four to eight developers seems to work best. Pairing up an interaction designer with a product manager is ideal.

What keywords should I look for in resumes? Most interaction designers have an online portfolio, and should be able to explain their projects well. Look for the following keywords: Wireframing, Prototyping, User Research, Omnigraffle, Indesign, HTML, CSS, jQuery and Prototyping.

What’s a great interview question to ask? “What’s the best story you have to tell about building a product, soup to nuts, and how you created a great user experience?”

Visual Design

Visual Designers create the look and feel of the product, and are sometimes called upon to establish the the brand voice. They select the colors, the icons, and define the look and feel that will be implemented by developers.

Visual Design is the trickiest skillset to define because it is the most in flux in today’s responsive design environment. Whether we like it or not, visual designers are being called on to do more of their work in HTML and CSS than Photoshop. The workflow from interaction design to final product should contain the fewest steps possible, and a visual designer that can’t function in HTML creates delays.

Most MVPs can survive without a visual designer early on. Resources like 99 Designs can be used, the front end engineer can hack together something. Remember, it’s about testing the idea with a controlled audience.

That initial pretty design you think is so important for the first version — it just isn’t, because you’ll be changing it over and over again.

Some websites have gone strictly with a design that looked like wireframes and launched that way, learning and designing as they went. That initial pretty design you think is so important for the first version — it just isn’t, because you’ll be changing it over and over again. Trust me.

Should I outsource it? Maybe. With an interaction designer or product manager that’s solid, they can manage an outside visual designer to come up with some great work. If you’re really strapped, you can go the 99 Designs route, but this may take more time than if you’d done it yourself.

Who else can perform the role? In smaller teams, Interaction Designers perform the Visual Design role. Some are opting for generalists with a visual and interaction design background. Many don’t need a full-time designer until late in the game. However, if you’re a consumer product, this should be one of the first hires. The best ratio is one visual designer for every four to eight developers.

What should I look for in resumes? Most visual designers have an online portfolio. Look for the following keywords: Illustration, Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML, CSS, jQuery, Prototyping.

What’s a great interview question to ask? “Who are the designers that influence you, and why?”

Content

Writing copy is the redheaded stepchild for any product. No one really wants to write copy because it’s so time consuming, but without it, usability and engagement is severely hindered. Copy is as important as the visual look to setting the tone and brand. Establishing this early with a single resource that can perform consistently is critical.

Copy is as important as the visual look to setting the tone and brand.

If you’re lucky, you’ll find a resource that can do both marketing and content development, solving both problems at the same time. A few members of the team will probably be contributing to this process.

Also, consider this: the product you are building now most likely isn’t the product that will become your startup. Copy and design will be changed early and often.

Should I outsource it? Maybe. Using someone in-house takes away from time they should be spending on something else (you know, like selling). A common solution is to write the first draft in house, and then hire a professional copywriter later on to revise the copy.

Who else can perform the role? Interaction Designers, Visual Designers, and Product Managers should all be able to write copy. For many, this will never be a full time position unless it’s a content-heavy site.

What should I look for in resumes? Great writers should be able to tell their story in a compelling way. Look for the following keywords: Copywriting, content strategy, marketing, lead generation.

Development

Someone has to build it, right? Developers are the people who take the dreams of product managers and designers everywhere and turn them into a working product. If they’re good, they can cut time to market from months to weeks, and give you a minimum viable product that you can test user assumptions against. If they’re not so good, they’ll kill your idea.

Building smaller, agile development teams can be better than building a massive team, because each additional member increases communication overhead.

The developers that you hire should be on the same page with each other on what platform to use and how to build it. Building smaller, agile development teams can be better than building a massive team, because each additional member increases communication overhead.

The best developers know how when to roll their own (build custom code), and know when to use frameworks. If they’re rolling everything custom, that tends to be a really bad sign unless it’s an extremely complex application.

Developers tend to come in two flavors: front-end and back-end. Ideally, the developers should be full-stack: generalists that can play on the front-end or back-end, but it may vary depending on your needs. And you have to watch out for specialists. If they are an architect, they may be rusty in coding. If they’re primarily a front-end developer, they might not know back-end development at all.

Front-end developers are skilled in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and jQuery. They connect the back-end to the design. For most interaction designers and product managers, front-end developers are very important because they implement the User Experience. They are in especially high demand because the difference between a good and a great application starts with a front-end developer that pays close attention to details.

Back-end developers are skilled in languages that connect to databases, like Java, .Net, PHP, Python, and Ruby on Rails. They should also have some database knowledge, and that could be anything from MySQL to Mondo DB. Their primary goals are to make the system flexible for future development and fast for current performance. Data structure is crucial: I’ve seen many a startup killed by poor database decisions.

Should I outsource it? Possibly. With strong project management, it can work, but it’s risky. Sometimes you can hire some in-house developers, and they’ll manage the outsource team. Any outsource development team, however, has very different goals (increasing billing amounts) than you do (building your idea for the lowest cost possible). Ideally, I would have one architect or senior-level developer that has skin in the game. Additional considerations include whether you should buy or build technology, or the complexity of the application. The fewer the variables in the business model, the easier it is to outsource.

Who else can perform the role? I’ve seen product people with development backgrounds, but the roles are so different that it’s hard to combine this role. Developers should be focused on building and testing code, and nothing else. Sometimes front-end development can be handled by the visual or interaction designers, but that’s not an ideal situation.

When should I hire this as a full time position? Most make their early recruits engineers, because if you can’t build it, you can’t launch it. However, with careful project management, I have seen some outsource their development. If your product is not truly technology based, it might be better to use consultants.

What should I look for in resumes? Well executed, completed projects where they worked with a team. Ask for demos. Look for the following keywords: Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, .NET, MySQL. Also look for projects that have similar business goals as your product idea.

What’s a great interview question to ask? “Given a typical e-commerce system, what approach would you take building it? What would the software development lifecycle look like?”

Other Resources

Quality Assurance

Someone has to make sure it works, right? Any good Product Manager or Interaction Designer should be able to put together a test plan that anyone can follow, or even better, you’re doing test-driven development and the engineers are writing unit tests.

However, that’s an ideal scenario.

If everyone else is busy, there are dedicated Quality Assurance resources you can hire. The best analysts I’ve met act almost as an additional product manager or interaction designer because they become gatekeepers for great product development. They help establish process and goals in a chaotic environment, and work to ensure steps are taken to deliver a good product.

Should I outsource it? Maybe. If you’re lucky enough to find someone that’s super detail oriented, it can work. But you can end up doing this yourself and wasting money in the process.

Who else can perform the role? This can be the “all hands on deck” role. The interaction designer, product manager, or developers can write test plans and go through the steps of making sure the product works.

When should I hire this as a full time position? This can wait because other roles can test early on for most products. I would hire it as the 10th or 15th member of the team. The number of developers establishes the staffing level for the rest of the company, and is determined by what kind of business you’re in.

What should I look for in resumes? Test-driven driven software development processes, and ideally a perfectly laid out resume without typographical errors. Look for the following keywords: Agile, automated testing, test plans.

A couple of years ago, I was interviewed by Venture Beat for an article about Google Plus. I firmly believed that large-scale user adoption for the social network was around the corner. It seemed to have a great feature set, and with their search engine they could drive significant traffic to the social network.

It hasn’t really happened.

The only people I see on my feed are Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble, and three Google employees I know. With its relaunch, I don’t know now if Plus is ever going to take off.

They can’t seem to bridge the gap between using their data to optimize a tool and how to use it to encourage social interaction in many of their applications.

Some features, like viewing the content, seem to be a direct rip-off of Pinterest. Google Hangouts look great when you first use it, but chat isn’t very usable with repeat usage. A lot of the products released during Google’s #io13 were beautiful and not usable at the same time, and they all seem to lack a social component.

A lot of Google’s products have that same social disconnect. They can’t seem to bridge the gap between using their data to optimize a tool and how to use it to encourage social interaction in many of their applications.

They design products that lack emotional connection

Very few people I meet say they “love” their Google products. And that’s the problem.

Their Android phones are usable. They like using Google search (or use it by default). They use the mail products. But when I ask if they “love their phone,” there’s usually a pause. They’ll love a feature or two, but do not have an emotional connection to the product itself.

Great products create emotional connections that go beyond their utility. People love their iPhones and love them so much that they buy other Apple products. Driving their BMW or Audi is an “experience.” This shows in Net Promoter Scores, where Apple scores in the high 70’s range with many of Google’s services at the bottom of the charts.

Emotional connection can’t be measured. It can’t be optimized through A/B testing, it is discovered through qualitative research.

I watched a grandmother interact with her grandchild electronically — the use of FaceTime to visit with someone who’s three time zones away, and doing it in a way that you could see the human value in their interactions was amazing. That moment for me was a realization that the product had become a way to enable human experiences. The technology itself had disappeared from the process.

Emotional connection is important because it gives companies leeway on building products that aren’t as successful.

iTunes isn’t easy to use. iCloud may have widespread user adoption, but confuses the user. Ping was shut down. However, it doesn’t hurt the larger brand, because consumers have an emotional connection with Apple and most of their core products.

There’s not a single Google tool I have an emotional connection with when I use it.

There’s not a single Google tool I have an emotional connection with when I use it. I’m typing this on a Chromebook. It’s nice, but I don’t love it. I have Gmail. It’s easy to use, but I don’t need it. I wrote this in Google Docs, but I could use other tools. I use Google search because it has more indexed pages, but I could Bing.

I need my iPhone. It’s emotionally connected to my life and makes my life easier. Therein lies the difference.

They design everything to be more efficient, not more delightful

Google design new tools or redesigns tools that already exist and make them much better. That’s not a bad thing, but they’re designing for efficiency and not delight.

Maps is a great improvement over previous applications (better than Mapquest and Yahoo). Search finds content you want or need, and can almost predict what you are looking for (better than AltaVista or Lycos). Their advertising tools are great at drilling down to what is the best return on investment for your dollar if you’re a small business. Google tests everything, because removing that one extra click could mean making millions of dollars.

They are great with taking vast amounts of data and presenting it in a way that we find useful, at optimizing searches so there’s always one less click. They hide complexity so we can find that page about the “hamster dance” right now. But not everything about the web is about utility. Humans like discovering new things, searching and playing.

The best discovery platforms show us not what we were looking for, but what we didn’t expect to find.

This requires developing a human connection.

The best discovery platforms show us not what we were looking for, but what we didn’t expect to find.

Facebook has a lot of that element: I’m not looking to find the photos of my friend’s party when I get there, I’m looking to find out my friends’ attendance. Pinterest is about discovering that new handbag. Instagram is about sharing our lives, one photo at a time. That’s why each has succeeded — there’s a particular human connection that goes past “is it a hammer or screwdriver” that Google seems to miss.

They doesn’t understand the environment they exist in

This is an example of Google Hangouts within context of my second screen. The multiple windows clutter the screen, and make it hard to manage chats. This is an example of something that you see only with ethnographic research i.e. watching people in their own environments.

This is especially evident in the Google Hangouts application. As chat windows open up, window after window appears at the bottom of the screen. If you’re chatting with several people, you could have up to six windows competing for your attention at the bottom of your monitor.

The problem? Chatting is something that is often a passive activity that you do in between all of the other work you do on your computer. You may be chatting with someone at work, a friend, or maybe even sending files. It’s something that happens “in between the raindrops,” the other work you are doing. It might be happening on a second screen at home while watching television, or at work, or while waiting for a friend. It’s a passive asynchronous distraction, not an active task.

Multiple chat windows works for Facebook because it happens within the context of a single environment — the Facebook browser tab. Once you hide this browser window, it’s out of sight and mind, but still accessible. Several other applications that I use, including Skype and Adium, all minimize screen real estate but still add notifications within the Mac OS X dock — out of sight until I want to solve it, within context.

Messaging software is not something you can actively test in a usability lab, because it’s unnatural there. Most of the time, when testing software this way, you are focused on certain tasks. They have to be tested under real world conditions (read: on-site visits) over hours or days of study of many real world users.

Many of the applications you use Google for (Maps, Search, Mail come to mind), are oriented to single tasks where the user’s attention is focused. The applications where the user’s attention is so unfocused (Hangouts and Google Plus) are where Google is struggling.

They know too much about us, and that makes us uncomfortable

Google has taken vast amounts of data and made it extremely manageable, even if it means dancing on the edge of violating our privacy.

The best example of this is Google Maps versus Apple Maps. The first version of Apple Maps was destined to be a trainwreck because Apple didn’t know they were solving a data problem, not a user experience problem. Users don’t want three dimensional renditions of their neighborhood — they want directions from 8th Avenue and Judah Street to Stockton Street and Columbus Avenue, and they want to know if they should be driving, taking a bus, or riding a bicycle, not what buildings they’re going to pass on the way. And they want to know it now.

That takes managing a vast amount of data. Which is exactly what Google is best at, and isn’t Apple’s core competency. Apple’s busy trying to fix it, but Google has a several year head start, and their culture is built around values that make it easy.

With many of Google’s services, cognitive dissonance is required: collecting that information is of great utility, but it requires collecting more information than we are comfortable with.

With many of Google’s services, cognitive dissonance is required: collecting that information is of great utility, but it requires collecting more information than we are comfortable with. We justify it in the moment (“How do I get to North Beach from Inner Sunset safely so I can have a drink at Tony Nik’s?”), and get upset about it when the usage of that data is disclosed (“Do they really track every time I do a search for a bar?”). The people that work there are comfortable with this because they believe this information should be open.

Google employees don’t have the same concerns about privacy as normal people because they are surrounded by unlimited access to data every day. It’s their culture.

You could almost say that Google’s mantra of “Don’t be evil” is in direct conflict with who they are as a company: primarily an ad-driven business that optimizes everything based on knowing every user’s behavior and storing it, forever. Many of their tools feed into this goal, and this is why Google Plus is such a painful fail. They understand the value of social data.

The failure seems to be that while they understand the value of social data, they can’t figure out how to use it to actually engage users in social interactions. It’s quite ironic, really.

Their mantra comes off of a disingenuous when compared to their core business. Users inherently distrust the company because we don’t want one organization knowing so much about us.

As much as Google wants to be soft, fuzzy and social, they almost can’t. Google Glass is a great example — there will be a successful technology that will come out just like it, but it won’t be from Google because of privacy concerns. Which leads to the next point.

They don’t hire the people they are designing for

The average technology worker in Silicon Valley has more in common with a farmer in Africa than a housewife in Iowa.

When you live in the Valley, you forget that not everyone uses iPads, Smartphones or all kinds of other technology. A lot of people make do with their three year old desktops, and they stay off “The Facebook.” I see this in Seattle, where there seems to be significantly less use of technology than in San Francisco.

This problem is especially exacerbated at Google.

The employee referral rates I have heard are in the high 75 to 80 percent range. People that work at Google are referring people that are like them, which creates a very homogenous culture. They are smart people, a lot of them from Stanford and Harvard, and they are probably great problem-solvers. But they aren’t hiring people from different backgrounds, with different viewpoints, and it’s creating a culture that is less about making truly diverse products and more about feeding the machine. This is a problem faced not only by Google, but by every company in Silicon Valley.

They have lost the connection to “the common man.” The common man doesn’t make $150,000 to $250,000 a year and take a company bus everyday down to Mountain View. They are insurance sales-people, car mechanics, housewives, and teachers that go home after work to watch “CSI: Miami”, not explore the town with Google Glass. They are my parents that have learned how to use an iPad, but do it to play Words With Friends.

An example of a market missed with Google Hangout is FaceTime users. Google might capture that market because they offer group video chat, the only major platform to do this for free. They will succeed not because of the emotional connection, but because they are the freely available option. Thus their success will be accidental because they aren’t aiming for that market.

The most telling point: view the FaceTime and Google Hangouts marketing, side by side. FaceTime emphasizes children and family without even mentioning who you’re calling. Google Hangouts emphasizes friends over family, and has twice as many screenshots of chats than faces.

To design for consumers, you have to have people on your team that are the target audience so you can design for it. The users have to live it.

Many other places, like Apple, Facebook, and MySpace (during their height), have that: the people that are in product development are also the target audience.

Jony Ive, for example, succeeds because he reflects a segment of the population that loves simple, well-designed products. Facebook first attracted an Ivy League, more affluent audience because that was their initial product team. They understand their target audience because they are their target audience.

Can Google build an emotional connection with their customers?

I don’t know if they can ever fix it. Many of the issues above are ingrained in their culture, and culture is really hard to change if you’re as big as Google.

Great companies develop brands that have an emotional connection with their customers, and this is something that marketers talk about endlessly when constructing their marketing programs. I saw this at Jobvite — the most devoted had an emotional connection with their product, and would bring it with them wherever they went. They were evangelical about their devotion to their product through thick and thin.

Google doesn’t seem to have it, because that’s not how they have built their company. You can’t optimize for culture.

But it does create opportunity for other startups. It’s a great cautionary tale when designing stuff for people — you have to not only understand them, you have to be them to really understand their needs.

When I speak at events — I just recently returned from SoCal UX Camp — I’m always surprised what I get asked after the presentation. I put the deck online (that’s usually the first request), but much of the information I disseminate is of the spoken variety. I’m kind of like Michael Stipe, who is famous for forgetting lyrics. Every time I do the presentation, I might say something different because I don’t have a script.

The people I love helping show an effort at getting to know me. They also ask great questions that go beyond the standard, “How do I write a resume.”

At the last few events, there’s been a line of people that wanted to talk to me after the presentation. I do these events for personal branding and because I love reaching out, but I can’t help everyone. The people I love helping show an effort at getting to know me. They also ask great questions that go beyond the standard, “How do I write a resume.” They show they’ve researched. Anyone can do this.

Based on my personal experience, here’s a few things that will help you make friends with speakers and make them your advocate.

Research them and read their blogs

The first thing any interaction designer should do to prepare for a conference is research the speakers.

The schedule for most events is usually up on the website for a month or two before the event. If there are particular speakers that you want to interact with, research them. Read their twitter feeds, go through their blogs, find out who they are and what information they are disseminating to their audience, and know it so you can comment it.

You don’t have to read all of their stuff, but be familiar with what they are saying.

What frustrates me is that I have roughly 45,000 words on my blog on the topic of writing resumes and UX careers with a big fat button that reads “UX Career Guide,” and no one seems to read it. When you search for my name, I’m roughly the first five pages of results on Google. Many of the posts are for my blog. I still routinely get the “How do I make my resume better” or “Where do I find the resume template” questions.

Please, read and research! The first thing any interaction designer should do to prepare for a conference is research the speakers.

Say something nice about the side project

Know how you can make me your best friend in the world? Talk about how you love the UX Drinking Game and share it with your friends.

Almost every single designer I know that hits the road on the speaking circuit has some kind of side project. Sometimes it’s a labor of love, or it might be an end goal for their career, but showing that you care means a lot.

I have the UX Drinking Game, something that I have spent a considerable amount of time and money building into what it is today. I’m neurotic about everything I do (at least everyone said I did a good job this weekend) because of that INTP thing (I’m very introverted, and I need data for most decisions). Positive feedback means a lot.

Know how you can make me your best friend in the world? Talk about how you love the UX Drinking Game and share it with your friends.

Buy their stuff

Do they have a book for $19.99? Are they doing a low-cost class? Do they have an application or two in the iPhone App Store for $2.99?

Do them a favor — buy it.

We try to price these items at a price point almost anyone can reach, and many of us see sales or site engagement as how we are providing value to the community at large.

We may love User Experience, but it also pays our bills. We try to price these items at a price point almost anyone can reach, and many of us see sales or site engagement as how we are providing value to the community at large.

Some speakers actually pimp out the work of other designers. I spoke highly about Russ Unger’s A Project Guide for UX Design Saturday, and I’m starting to use Laura Klein’s book UX for Lean Startups for startup types. I have a library of books by other designers that I routinely speak about and share at events. Many speakers hit the circuit specifically to sell books, and after a while the flights and hotels get to be draining.

I’m not saying you have to go to every $1,400 event that comes along, but spending $19.95 for an eBook doesn’t seem to be much of an ask.

Offer to buy them a drink

The best conversations I have had at events have been outside of actual sessions.

It could be a coffee or a whiskey, but a small token of appreciation is awesome. The best conversations I have had at events have been outside of actual sessions.

At the SoCal UX Camp, a designer with a sociology background, Sara De La Cruz, offered me a cup of coffee. We had a wonderful conversation at a nearby coffee shop about how our careers were similar, and we talked through great ideas about how she could make a career shift to UX design. I offered several suggestions, and further questions showed that she was really taking steps to break into the field.

It wasn’t a long conversation (I think about 30 minutes), but with that small sign of gratitude she gained a friend for life. And the drink didn’t even have any whiskey in it.

Bring business cards

Your cards should list your name, what you do, and a contact method, like your Twitter address or website.

In our virtual world, I know it sounds kind of odd, but a small card is a great way to introduce yourself. There’s almost no friction, it’s an easy way to make an introduction. They don’t have to have your business on them. I paid something like $40 for mine, and I think they look great.

Your cards should list your name, what you do, and a contact method, like your Twitter address or website. It also works with recruiters — if you meet one at an event, you can give them a business card and they’ll usually reach out to you the next week.

Another thing — I remember faces, but I have a really, really hard time with names. If you meet me, ask me about the time I forgot a C-Level manager’s name, six months after working at the company.

Have your shit together

If you’re an interaction designer that has done a bunch of work, or want to be one and have relevant experience, I want to talk to you! We can discuss your difficulties in finding a job, and you become an ideal candidate for user research.

If you have just graduated college and have three college projects in your portfolio, or you’re a used car salesman that’s never touched Dreamweaver or Omnigraffle before, I can’t help you.

There are a ton of resources on the web that talk about how to prototype, start side projects, and learn about the field. If the first question you ask is, “How do I break into User Experience” I know you didn’t do your research, because the first few results on Google include an article that I wrote on the subject.

User Experience is not a passing hobby, it’s something you have to live and breathe. That’s an investment. Respect ours.

I’ll be speaking at the SoCal UX Camp, and at 4pm we’ll be moving the shindig over to 7 Seas in downtown Garden Grove. I’ll buy a drink for the first five people that show me they have downloaded the UX Drinking Game.